Mr. Sabourin, who has led Streem’s technology build since day one, said the company had found the right balance between AI, natural language processing (NLP) and human smarts in its platform build.

“AI is not replacing humans, it’s augmenting them. The scale and speed of Streem’s intelligence capability combined with the need for accuracy in the content we deliver to customers shows the mix is working well,” Sabourin said.

“The last thing we want to do is replace people, they’re key to our business and add extraordinary value. But tech has allowed us to leap-frog our legacy competitors in the way we monitor and analyse content. It’s doing 90% of the heavy-lifting.”

Streem analyses millions of Print and Online articles, hundreds of thousands of hours of TV and Radio, and millions of social posts in its platform, delivering this to customers through its Desktop and Mobile platform. Streem has to manage this content as-it-happens and ensure it gets to customers within minutes of publication or broadcast.

“Our biggest challenge is the sheer quantity of content. Media isn’t linear anymore, you can’t just pickup a newspaper and know there’s a beginning, middle and end,” he said.

“As engineers, we’ve worked hard to combine great quality services like those from Google with our own proprietary technology, and leverage really smart people in the business. It’s freeing them up to build smart media intelligence products that would have otherwise not come to market”

The company is exclusive media monitoring provider to some of Australia’s largest corporate and government organisations including the AFL, Samsung, ANZ, the ATO and Myer, and the bar is set high.

“When we get it wrong, and occasionally we do, we feel it. Our customers demand instant delivery of media but it also has to be accurate and therein lies the challenge. We’ve definitely raised the bar in forms of expectation,” Mr. Sabourin added.

Streem has made a significant investment in both its software engineering and account management teams, who work side-by-side from the company’s Surry Hills HQ. Staff numbers have doubled in the last year across both engineering and Account Management teams as the company continues to scale out its offering.

The company’s partnership with Google has enabled it early access to new technology, and direct access to Product Managers at the search giant.